Announcing NCM 7.7With NCM 7.7, you can examine the rules that make up an access control list for a Cisco ASA device. Then you can apply filters to display only rules that meet the specified criteria, order the rules by line number or by the hit count, and much more. See new features and improvements.

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Video Transcript

Now that you have finished creating and saving a view, you need to go back into it now because you didn’t actually add any resources to the view. So right now it’s completely empty. From the Manage Views page select Demo View from the view list and click edit.

To add resources to the view,you click the plus symbol to the right of one of your columns, which brings up a list of available resources.

While building views is easy, the tricky part is finding the right resources that will show you the information you want to see in the way you want to see it. To help minimize the choices, the resources that are available are dependent on the type of view you chose. Based on the Summary view type I selected when I built this view, I have a total of 420 resources to choose from. And that’s actually the smallest number of resources for any view type. Several view types have twice as many available resources or more. So it will take some time to figure out what resources you have available and which ones you prefer. But it’s worth investing that time, because the more resources you’re familiar with, the more dynamic you can make your views.

Let’s start with just some basic resources. For my junior network admin, I think I’ll include the ‘All Nodes’ resource, Click the page advance arrow and you will see the All nodes resource

Notice that there are actually several All Nodes resources. Each is just slightly different in how the list of nodes can be displayed and sorted. So here again it’s worth your time to check them out and look at the differences so you know which ones you prefer.

Scrolling through page after page of resources is going to be cumbersome so we have included the ability to search. On the left you have a grouping option. If you click the ‘group by’ dropdown you’ll see you have three grouping methods. You’ll need to try out the different groupings to see which you prefer. For now, we're going to choose to group by Type of resource, select events to show all event resources, and choose the Last 25 Events. While here, we'll also add the Network wide availa

bility chart by selecting the Charts Type, advancing to the 2nd page and selecting the network wide availability chart.
Grouping the resources makes searching a little easier if you know broadly what sort of resource you’re looking for but don’t know the resource name. There’s also a search field at the top of the window. Let's run a search for map.

You’ll notice that this is a contains search, not a starts with search, so I see all the resources with map in the title. Or at least the first five resources with map in the title. If there are more than five, you can click on search for more to see everything..

So now you can see all the resources with the word map in the name. Let's add the map resource and the worldwide map resource. Click add selected resources.

Returning to the view editor, you'll see all the resources are crowded into the left hand column. You can distribute these between the columns by selecting a resource and then clicking on the right or left arrow. You can also reorder the resources within the column if you need to as well. Now that the resources are positioned where you want them, you can click on Preview and see how it looks.

Now you can see all your resources and that they’re where you want them to be. But this view isn’t really very user friendly. The All Nodes resource is taking up way too much space for starters. But thankfully a lot of the resources are configurable.

Click on Edit on All Nodes, and you've got some options for how this resource will display its data. You can rename the resource if you’d like. But more significantly under Grouping nodes there are three levels of grouping. For level one, we're going to pick Vendor, Level 2 we'll pick machine type, and level 3 we'll pick status and click submit.

Now the ‘All nodes’ resource is much more condensed and much more viewable. You can expand your Windows category, then Expand the 2012 servers, and see the list of which servers are up and which are down.

Each resource is going to have a slightly different set of configuration options. With the down nodes resource about all I can do is rename the resource. The last 25 events resource isn’t configurable at all.

There are a wide range of charts and graphs you can add to your views, and a lot of them are pre-configured so that you can start seeing meaningful data immediately without spending a lot of time or needing an advanced knowledge of the database to configure them. The network wide availability chart is such a chart. It shows average availability across your entire scanning environment, and lets you configure how you want that information displayed.

Click Edit and you can choose how far back in time you want the chart to go. You can choose the zoom range within that time period, and you can choose how much detail you want to see in the data. Now that you’ve made your selections you can come back to your view and see a nice and simple chart with a lot of information that you didn’t have to spend a lot of time setting up.

After configuring your resources to look the way you’d like, you might discover that you don’t like the layout of your view quite as much as you thought you would. Or maybe you realize that your column widths aren’t quite wide enough to accommodate all the data in some of your resources. If you’re happy with the resources you’ve selected and you just want to make basic changes to the layout of the view, you can do that without necessarily having to go back into the view editor.

If you’ll notice, at the top of each of your resources there is a little handle. You can grab the resource and reposition it by drag and drop. You can also resize your column width by dragging the slider in between the columns.

Another word of caution, when you make a change to column size or resource placement, you are not only making a change to your view, you are also making a change for anyone else that relies on this view. You can restrict view management rights permission in the user's account.